Chapter 8 #2
‘And do you know what else you can do?’ Melody says.
‘Contact this bridge guy Al Collins at Bridgespan. Send him a good old-fashioned letter, I’ll provide his address for you at the end of the episode.
Write to him – no emails – we want a good old-fashioned letter, we want bags and bags of your letters arriving to his office telling him you want your love lock back. ’
They record on Thursdays and it airs on Monday.
Instantly Melody has such a response to the episode she can’t believe it.
There are a few emails from people to tell her about where in the world they left their love locks, and why.
Some corny love stories and one devastating story about a couple who lost their baby and wanted to honour her by locking their love on a bridge.
But the overwhelming response confirms her theory: on the day the love locks were removed from the bridge, hundreds of couples who had their locks on the bridge broke up.
She was awake most of the night reading through all of the DMs and messages she’d received on social media.
In the morning, Claire is sitting at the island counter, the marble surface covered in photographs.
Melody sees ghastly photographs of body parts, with gruesome cuts and injuries.
There are a selection of knives on the counter and a watermelon that has been sliced in half.
Claire picks up a large knife and stabs it into the watermelon.
It splashes its juice onto the counter. Claire studies the slice and then picks up the next knife. She stabs it again.
Wide-eyed, Melody walks at a distance around her. She takes a pot of plain Greek yoghurt from the fridge.
‘I had a love lock on a bridge in Amsterdam,’ Claire says, taking Melody by surprise.
She didn’t think that Claire even listened to her podcast. Her intellect intimidates Melody and she always feels like an idiot in her company. For the first few months living there, she used to switch her reality TV shows over to news stations when Claire came home.
‘It wasn’t my idea,’ Claire explains. ‘The guy I was dating wanted to do it and when he padlocked it to the bridge, with our names, and date, forever, it was the moment I knew I wanted to break up with him. He wanted to throw the key into the river, and I told him I wanted to do it. So I swung my arm back.’ She re-enacts it and Melody can imagine her in court, black glove on, sparkling knife in her hand as she re-enacts a bloody murder.
‘And I pretended to throw it. I pocketed the key instead. Then the next morning when he was asleep I got up early, went back to the bridge, and unlocked it.’
‘That would be a perfect story for my pod,’ Melody says, sitting at the counter and tucking into her yoghurt.
‘No,’ she says firmly and Melody doesn’t need to be told twice.
‘Did you break up with him?’
‘When we got home. Would have been an awkward plane journey.’
‘Sounds like something I’d do.’ Melody is surprised that Sam didn’t suggest a love lock on their travels.
He was the romantic, thoughtful one while Melody ran a mile from gestures.
She wasn’t much of a hand-holder either.
She hated being limited to using one hand.
‘A love lock seems so final. So,’ she wraps her hands around her neck and squeezes.
‘Diane and I have a love lock on the Grace Plunkett Bridge,’ a voice says from the couch. It’s Tom. Melody didn’t realise he was still here.
Again, proof that her theory is correct!
‘You had a love lock,’ Claire says. ‘You obviously didn’t hear the breaking news on Melody’s podcast. The love locks were removed. They were too heavy for the bridge.’
Tom sits up. ‘Where are they now?’
Melody shrugs. ‘That’s a good question, but I urge you, as I did to my listeners, to send a strongly worded letter to the bridge guy who removed them. Al Collins. I can give you his address.’ She licks the spoon.
‘I imagine Dublin City Council sent them to scrap metal recycling,’ Claire says.
‘Our lock was a Louis Vuitton luggage lock, it cost a fortune.’
‘I’m pretty sure when you lock something on public property without permission, you lose the right to call it your property.’ Then to Melody, ‘Don’t worry, he’s leaving today.’
‘I can hear you,’ he says.
‘I have a no-men-in-the-apartment rule and I’m breaking it,’ she says to him, stabbing the watermelon again.
‘I’m your brother.’
‘That’s okay, I don’t mind. He’s your brother,’ Melody says, agreeing.
‘Doesn’t mean you should trust him. Women are statistically most likely to be murdered by a man they know.’
‘Hello!’ Tom says. ‘I’m right here, and you’re the one stabbing watermelons.’
‘And I don’t really know him,’ Melody says.
‘I won’t be home tonight,’ Claire says.
Melody’s stomach sinks. She’ll have to make plans at short notice.
‘She’s afraid to be alone,’ Claire explains to Tom, as if Melody isn’t in the room.
‘Just at night.’
‘Are you afraid of the dark?’ Tom asks.
‘No.’
Melody ponders how to explain how every little sound terrifies her.
How she sets traps from the front door all the way to her bedroom and sleeps with the door open and one eye open.
How she’s afraid she’ll be attacked, that the place will go on fire, that she’ll be raped, beaten, abducted, tortured, that she’ll wake to find a psycho standing over her watching her.
That her entire family and friends will be kidnapped and she’ll be forced to choose one to live.
She’s afraid there will be natural disasters, that the Liffey will flood, that there will be a fire in the building, that a tornado will whip through the city, that a foreign army will overthrow the country, that there will be an outbreak, another pandemic, and that having one person in the apartment with her, just one, in another room, asleep, who hasn’t the ability to protect her in any of these circumstances will be the difference in her not having any of these thoughts at all.
They’re both looking at her.
‘She’s afraid of her thoughts,’ Claire says, in her practical voice.
‘Are you staying?’ she asks Tom.
He looks hopefully at his sister.
‘Nope. Tom is going to be busy moving on with his life. I said one night and it’s been more than one night.’
‘Okay,’ he says, with a sigh. He pulls himself up from the couch and drags himself to the counter where he studies the watermelon that she has stabbed, and the photographs. ‘That one,’ he says, pointing to a knife with a serrated edge. ‘It matches the slash here.’
‘And that’s why you’re not staying here tonight,’ Claire says, eyeing her brother.
Melody takes her breakfast to her room and immediately rings Belinda.
‘Hi, Mum, how do you fancy a night in Dublin tonight?’
Usually Belinda says yes. She likes a day in the city now and then, but mostly she is the best mother who is more often than not there when Melody needs.
‘I can’t, sweetheart, I’m sorry. I’m currently going through Derek’s things and getting them all out of here. Out, out, out.’
She sounds distracted, busy. As though she’s stuffed inside someone’s shoe.
‘The man is a hoarder and I’m not being stuck with his crap.’
‘What are you doing with his things?’ Melody asks, aghast, feeling heartbroken for boring Derek.
All of his weird little bric-a-brac tat that he bought at yard sales.
How he’d proudly exhibit eerie little porcelain statues that look like they belonged in old lady houses, or a pair of binoculars that need a new lens, or tide clocks that don’t work.
‘I’m putting them in boxes and if he doesn’t come and get them quickly I’ll send them to a charity shop.’
‘Mum, that’s mean.’
She sighs. ‘I’ll give him a day to collect them.’
The anger in Belinda’s voice, Melody has never heard it before, she doesn’t like it.
‘What did he do?’
‘Nothing.’